Hermegasmica

ANDREW NIGHTINGALE




This e-book edition was published in the United Kingdom in
2011 by Shearsman Books Ltd, 58 Velwell Road, Exeter, EX4
4LD

It is available at
www.shearsman.com/pages/books/ebooks/ebooks_home.html

Hermegasmica is copyright Andrew Nightingale, 2011, and is
reproduced with the authors permission. This e-book may be
downloaded for the readers personal use, but may not be sold,
copied, distributed or disseminated in any other way without
the prior permission of the author.

Hermegasmica first appeared in the online journal Sidereality.







Hermegasmica
A non-linear murder mystery

4






It's a tune you can't quite remember: phrasings return,
but a dandelion head blown into summer sky
won't let polyphony be pieced together.
From the dirge of the tunnel on Fairfield,
crossing into Granby Row,
it's a night for the Hermegasmica,
for Moanin' Low. I've no need to remind you however,
as Herr Haller said, "An unknown man gave me a little book"
and all hell lies below
its charming surface. For each love song
search out its complimentary murder. Work on this
the Entscheidungsproblem.



5






given any expression Q in the notation of the system,
it can be determined whether or not Q is provable in the system
The Entscheidungsproblem expressed in this
apparently means we can at least work out from the text
whether we know the murderer or
it's not possible to know the murderer.
Turing, fossilised in Sackville Gardens, was poisoned
by an apple laced with cyanide. In the tautologousness of this crime
of syncopated incision
the instrumentalist did no more work
than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck. It was
over in a song.


6






In Marilyn's bar a transsexual does her best Lady Day,
Lover Man, Don't Explain. Later on, cocktail-bruised
and looking for a minicab, she takes the line offered
in the crease of a tenner, Billie in extremis. Did they
kick the stereo on, watch her
dance, a Strange Fruit,
behind the beat? Did they try to wake her? Did they
share solo space with her? She just can't
remember a thing.
It's five a.m., there's a sour taste
to the last of her lipstick and it's too cold to be walking
home on Oxford Road.



7






It was the sort of thing you'd buy at a Fair, and inside
in the tone-colours of jazz, in an armchair at the club,
in the gramophone's contamination, I found myself unwitting
but yes, for certain, inside that Herman Hesse novel.
a man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber,
and subject to strict discipline,
is in effect a universal machine
Now if this is right my expectation will make
physical a little shop,
somewhere just off Chinatown.
When I get there she'll be dead but something wonderful
may have happened.


8






one word
for the Hermegasmica would be
jass

whore's perfume
jasmine or jism, the end in
clonus

to interpret
this winged messenger of discharge
turnaround



9






Moonflower, he called her. Six in the morning, the first traffic
pushing through the wet grey light. She shivers, folds her arms
to hug herself. A flimsy Canton silk dress in arterial red and ridiculous
five inch patent heels misplaced into early commuters. A lock
from her henna-red wig (the Adele)
hangs forward clumped with dry saliva.
God damn him. She blocks him out with a Metallica mp3.
If he weren't a probabilistic automaton and she wasn't
held in a set of functional states,
she'd say, like Billie Holliday,
don't threaten me with love, baby, let's just go walking
in the rain.


10






He had her up against the wall round the back of the Portland
(a four star establishment) where they load the laundry. He says
it was so cold his feet were nearly numb and she was on tiptoes
and from Malaysia and on the periphery of royalty. Somehow
all that shrink-wrapped Chinese porn paid off.
Drunk on Pernod she swore, or so he says,
incessantly in her own language, but the clever thing,
it's the tricks they can do, it's all about
muscular control,
practice, enculturation or perhaps
just race. She never took off her headphones and don't ask me
to pronounce her real name.



11






In the Bull's Head Jerry Preston, keeping tabs
on the lateness of the 18:53 to New Street,
discourses on his impressive collection of knives:
silver shards, cutlery ranked in a baize lined drawer.
Beads of real-ale quiver on the fringe
of his yeasty moustache as
- it's very simple, he repeats, common sense,
easily comprehended: she says you will carry out my command
and - kill me. There.
Concealed steel warms
to the skin, a deep and perfect stainless splinter singing
so high only dogs hear.



12






When he rolled out a smile with that one
moistened gold incisor you knew,
as he always said he had, he got some mean good
bad shit, combing through the pockets
of his beat-up sheepskin as he did,
spilling flakes of foil,
stopped half across Whitworth Park. Just near here
they'll find the body sinking like the night's rain
made it heavy.
The gallery was showing
Blake: I went for the Ancient of Days, it's smaller
than you think.



13






Scrubbing floors in a Moss Side brothel, rehospitalising
the corners of spent beds, unschooled
she may have been and I never had the chance
to play with dolls, she was sweet sour kind mean profane lovable
impossible.
I plunged in my knife to the hilt.
What a night, what a moon, what a girl. It was over
before she'd finished singing the words.
I'm painting the town
red in this momentary vault of screaming and false nails
in Whitworth Park where I set my compass
upon the face of the deep.





14







I would
have kissed away the blood
peculiar

the canal
in her own way shameful
unzipped

black Armani
and a banker's townhouse unlocked
overlooked



15





I was walking home late one night. I know I went under
the Imperial Chinese Arch on Faulkner Street, maybe Mei Sum,
maybe Drag Phoenix, it could have been Chain or Pine,
something tells me I won't find it again.
There was an alley I turned down,
I'd never been there before,
a dead-end and a red neon sign fizzing over a shopfront.
It was Hermegasmica, open for business.
It's a tune
you know you've heard before. This old wall in an old town
on a wet night. Lit up, a swing door
inviting. I could enter.
but not yet.



16





Gdel's first incompleteness theorem, a soot-clad kneeling
golem, spluttering on PVC thigh-boots.
Grinning down, the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine (MADAM)
constructs this image of Venus in Furs.

Can this sentence be true but not provable in the theory?
Can Turing's test work its gaming on a man and a woman?
Games under these remote-terminal conditions
generate a DI-ed folie a deux.

Did the interrogator know the woman?
Can't you tell?
Guess which woman will be lying
dead in the grass in Whitworth Park.



17





Completeness can't be achieved,
criminals walk free in nights
cold as wrought iron, in
Cluedo poems unsolved.

Feed Mozart to the brains of the unborn.
Float in an isolation tank listening to whales.
City pubs of stressed financiers at the
critical age, the middle-eight,

go home to listen to the womb-from-inside,
funnelled through Bang & Olufsen.
Candle-light, joss-sticks and a blowjob
given by a big-boned masseuse.



18






caught by a dog and shaken to death. It didn't stop. I ran.
throwing up. The ground was hard.
then I lost her too.
Once again the Wedding Present were playing at the International.
But it was over.
We went crazy down the front. I lost you.
she and I leant on each other for support,
The joke of rolled up banknotes, nodding at the clich.
heard the cry of a hare
I was kneeling in an alley under a pin sharp moon
I must have dropped my wallet.
There was a girl: both darkened by sweat



19





Finally he turned when a bitter chocaholic
covered him in clothes pins.
He dropped playing French horn
in a Lancashire marching band.
The solemn crush he got,
on a Marxist who played acoustic, went bad
and I saw him last on Venice Street.
He was burned out,
leaning on some red-brick derelict
for all the world
straight from Tom Waits circa Blue Valentine.
But I heard he's clear now,
head shaved, doing Krishna,
Q&A for a small donation
outside the Arndale.



20






Blackmarket video in some fifty or so
select video recorders. She has tears on her face.
Filming in black and white, Hitchcock used
chocolate sauce for blood. The light comes
in and out, grainy
edges dissolving
in constant play like CCTV. A blade contrasts briefly
with the matt pallor of a cheek as the soundtrack
is severed by racked bass,
a dance beat dubbed on while she looks
in a sullen moment of epiphany
straight at the camera.



21







Direct Input. You jack the axe into the desk,
you jam a bloodied shirt in the washing machine.
DI. You slump into 38D (facing), loosing
your twenty Marlboro and zippo in a sliding stack
across the carriage table.
If they expect you to escape
by train you take a plane but if they second guess that
you actually take that train.
Piccadilly slips away. Your father said run a sink full
of cold water, stick your head in,
snort, and think.



22


With the walking bass
of my heart I've walked
up from Rusholme
until on a bench
in Whitworth Park
I've stopped,
opened her letter,
and read it
twice.
She's got
the pillow I sent,
the one I dreamed on,
acting out
(lyrics by The Smiths).
She's laid her head
there each night
in sunny Hastings
and I'm thinking
of you
and
get well soon.

23






The Royal Exchange, that hooded golden flower
of tinted mirrors, polished fake brass, uplit and full of perfume
like a duty free on a ferry.
In the centre a young woman in a business suit gives out
free samples of fudge and chocolates.
This could be the chromatic heart.
She smiled. 'Harry? Have you found me?'
One day we were so hungry we could barely breathe.
With a curse
I came back to the razor. Crazy he calls me
the publisher brought me.
Good morning, heartache.


24

join me
in this private loop I
playback

every day
ask what do you do
driving

thirty years
in a loop like a
ghost

come landlord
fill the flowing bowl until
until

until until
until it doth run over

the irony
of kerb crawling is not
lost

25






I stopped in the Club, I told him I was a dancer.
He said to dance. I tried it. He said I stunk.
Turing agreed to take hormone therapy for a year
instead of going to prison.
For hormones and surgery
I need proof of a dysphoria
for the therapist. Questions like
have you always disliked maths?
Imagine a garden
with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand flowers.
We are not dealing here
with man.


26

In the attic
I extracted
the instrument,
brought it down,
and I'm vamping

but something wonderful may have happened.

I'm back
to the games
I forgot I'm playing,
impro solo
speaking easy.

Tonight the shop is opening, the sign is lit.

I'm looking
for devices
over circling fifths,
miscellaneous progressions
for neat licks.

We're under the red light, Pablo on sax, Harry with Novalis,
and the instruments ready.
27







A4 sheets filled with pencilled tab notation,
a Peavey practice amp picking up mains hum,

but the room is empty.
His heart is enlarged. When it's back to normal
they'll send him home to Autumn Leaves
and he can trill, slide, bend again
for the ghosts in his Rusholme let,

waiting for the Candyman Blues.



28






The Manchester Royal Exchange presents
THE LONDON CHINESE ORCHESTRA
"Silk and Bamboo"
with Best Wishes from the Hong Kong Bank group.
She bags the leftover cubes of chocolate
folded in sticky doily and catches the end
of the midday performance.
THE MOON IS BRIGHTEST IN MY VILLAGE and
THREE REPETITIONS ON PLUM BLOSSOM
and PLUCKING A FLOWER (Cheng Yu, Chinese lute)
it depicts the unbending characteristics of plum blossoms in the snow
Her heart is clogged with fudge.



29





A trickle of blood from the corner of the mouth that is too red,
a simulation referencing seventies Hammer.

Decide: How had I, with the wings of youth and poetry, come to this?
Dealing phrases like an arbitrary machine, subject to restrictions of finiteness.
Death like this would seem
deviant to Turing, an inadequate representation of the ordinary notion
Dressing in a red silk Qi Pao would pass as

great Bohemian chic. She bows her head and composes her face.

A human operator works in a disciplined but unintelligent manner,
a trickle of blood is left on her lip like a clich.



30







Make the Hermegasmica copious, gliss
like a butterfly in Chinatown night.

Hermione your hostess
is in the tritone Garden of Crime.
Your tool is the knife.
The door is open under the neon sign, you hear
the willowing croon of a glam-doll and see

a thousand winking fairy lights.